The net expands. We often talk about the Internet as a new technology, but 2007 marked the 51st anniversary of its founding -- long before Al Gore was a member of congress.
After Russia launched Sputnik in 1956, the U.S. established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later began work to help scientists communicate. In 1959 UCLA established the first site on what would later become the Internet.
The research was done to determine the most reliable way to transmit information from one place to another. A message was broken into packets, which flowed over dedicated lines. The lines intersected at nodes where the packets could transfer to new lines, much as trains do at switching yards. Messages were broken up and put into electronic envelops, coded so the machine at the destination could put them back together in the correct order.
The researchers' agreed that each computer in the chain would use common procedures, or protocols, so the messages could be understood by every computer in the network.
The early networks linked thousands of users, but the system was dominated by scientists and government researchers. Internet lore claims that Queen Elizabeth II sent out an e-mail message in 1976 from a British army base.
Since the Queen's email message, millions of people from all walks of life and all ages, have discovered the Internet. Many events have contributed to this, including:
- The cost of personal computers dropped, while the servers and the technology needed to connect computers together became much more powerful and faster.
- Commercial access providers brought e-mail into the offices and homes of millions.
- Online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online introduced computer users to the concept of communicating and receiving electronic information through a modem over telephone lines.
- Content expanded from scientific papers to information of interest to a much wider audience. We've moved from transmitting scientific papers to writing notes, researching life in Plymouth in 1627, watching movie clips and checking out what's happenin' at NASA.
At this point users were frustrated by the need to learn complex computer commands, as well as the difficulty in finding what they needed. Until the mid 1990's, the Internet looked like the world's biggest library with the books piled on the floor and no card catalog.
While technology made it possible to link every computer in the world, an easy-to-use navigational tool was needed to help people sort through the huge amount of information suddenly available. Fortunately, this need was met by the development of browsers to navigate the World Wide Web.
